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Iraq ‘Divide and Rule’ Strategy Called Shortsighted

Monday, May 5th, 2008

Inter Press Service | Five years since U.S. President George W. Bush’s infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech, critics say the administration has yet to show a credible way to actually “accomplish” the mission that could see a peaceful Iraq and a return home of U.S. troops.

Though the 2007 revamping of the counter-insurgency strategy, known as the “surge,” has markedly reduced violence, political turmoil and ethno-sectarian strife still plague Iraq.

The U.S. surge and its concurrent positive developments did create political space, but meaningful moves toward comprehensive political accords and reconciliation have yet to follow, said a pair of new Iraq reports from the International Crisis Group (ICG).

For example, the Sunni Awakening, or Sahwa movement, that helped to slow violence in much of Baghdad and Anbar province by bringing in former insurgents and incorporating them into U.S.-funded militias, for example, leaves a new Sunni political landscape.

But that landscape, with all of its advantages for bringing stability – and thereby aiding the U.S. occupation – has failed to transition into the politics of the Iraqi central government. Frustration with those failures creates a tense atmosphere that even U.S. officials acknowledge as being “fragile and reversible.”

“Tribal elements and former insurgents may become disillusioned with lack of political progress, inadequate steps toward economic and social inclusion, and what they perceive as continued dominance by Iran and its Shi’ite proxies,” said the first IGC report, “Iraq After the Surge I: The New Sunni Landscape.”

So while the larger insurgent-U.S. battles and wider Sunni-Shia fighting have abated, the new, smaller, more subdivided groups continue to bump heads. The U.S. policy of tending to choose between these groups with either economic or military support, said the report, does not constitute meaningful steps toward political reconciliation.

The IGC report notes that the U.S. “divide-and-rule tactics” reinforce the new fault lines in society, and by benefiting only one group, create resentment among the others.

“Ultimately, stability will require that such rivalries be mediated neither through violence nor buy-off, but by functional, legitimate state institutions,” said the report. That, in turn, requires the U.S. to support “a genuinely inclusive political system.”

Another incident of U.S. favoritism that could lead to sharp divides and potential large-scale violence is the intra-Shia power struggle for control of southern Iraq.

Backed by U.S. air power, an offensive by the two main power-sharing partners in the Iraqi central government, Da’wa and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, in the southern strongholds of militant anti-U.S. cleric Moqtada al-Sadr was designed to cripple Sadr and his Mahdi Army militia ahead of provincial elections scheduled for this fall.

When the advance was thwarted by Sadrist fighters, the ruling Shia parties took up a piece of legislation that was aimed at scuttling Sadr’s bid in the elections by making it illegal for parties with militias to participate.

Council on Foreign Relations fellow Mohammad Bazzi wrote in the Washington Times that though Sadrists and the Mahdi Army were not named in the legislation, it is clearly a misguided attempt to isolate them – noting that other parties such as ISCI are not hampered though they, too, have militias.

“It’s virtually impossible to wipe out the Sadrist trend, which is a social, political, and military movement that enjoys wide support, particularly among young and poor Shi’ites,” wrote Bazzi.

“The consequences of trying to isolate Sheik al-Sadr and his political movement are profound,” said Bazzi, saying that the move would end a Sadr cease-fire and drastically increase violence aimed at both the U.S. and the central Iraqi government.

Noting the situation in the second report, “Iraq After the Surge II: The Need For a New Political Strategy,” ICG recommends that the Iraqi government hold provincial elections on the original schedule of Oct. 1, 2008, and “ensure that these are inclusive of all parties, groups and individuals that publicly accept nonviolence (rather than, at this stage, disband their militias).”

This runs contrary to the law before the Iraqi parliament, and would allow incorporation of Sadrists into above-board politics.

“If [the Sadrists are going to sweep the South], that needs to be allowed to happen – so long as it’s the result of a free and fair election and not at the barrel of a gun,” Jason Gluck of the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) told IPS.

“If you want to talk about political progress, there are many justifications for confronting the armed militias, particularly the Mahdi Army,” said Gluck. “But that confrontation must be coupled with political opportunity and engagement. The Sadrists need to be ensured that if they comply, there are going to be free and fair elections.”

“My criticism would be that there has not been this olive branch – this welcoming into the political process – that’s simultaneous with the military engagement,” continued Gluck, who is a rule-of-law adviser with USIP. “It has not been made clear that while Sadr and the Mahdi Army must disarm, or at the very least disavow violence [as with the ICG proposal], if they do that they will be welcomed into the political process.”

Gluck acknowledged that the dealings of Sadrist members of parliament – in line with the general Sadrist Iraqi nationalism – already show that they are capable of meaningful political engagement, most importantly across sectarian lines.

“We can promote that by encouraging Sadr to rely on the political process and not on the barrel of a gun,” he said.

The IGC report on the new politics needed in Iraq reinforced the importance of the provincial elections as a stepping stone toward true reconciliation.

“If genuinely free and fair and carried out in a secure environment, these hold the potential of beginning to alter the political landscape by bringing a new generation and class of political leaders to the fore,” it said.

Nearly all observers agree that action needs to be taken soon in the relative calm provided by the U.S. surge strategy.

“There is reason to fear this is only a temporary salve and that underlying issues will again come to the fore,” said the IGC report. “Whatever political space the surge tore open is likely to narrow once again.”

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UN official decries weakening of press freedom

Monday, May 5th, 2008

Dawn | UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour has decried weakening of press freedom world over, saying that governments are becoming more secretive and offering propaganda disguised as objective information — especially when alleged security-related issues are on the table.

In a message on the occasion of Press Freedom Day, Ms Arbour noted that harassment and secrecy laws were weakening press freedom. “It is a sad fact that many governments across the world persist in undermining the freedom of the press to report facts and opinions and, by extension, the right of people in general to be informed about events and policies that are shaping our world,” Louise Arbour said.

The proliferation of new or strengthened secrecy laws meant that the media were forced to resort to speculation, which can then be used against them to further undermine their credibility, or even as a justification for initiating legal proceedings against them, she said.

“When information flows freely, people are equipped with tools to take control of their lives,” Secretary-General of the UN Ban Ki-moon noted in his message for the day. “When the flow of information is hindered – whether for political or technological reasons — our capacity to function is stunted.”

Mr Ban stressed that a free, secure and independent media was one of the foundations of peace and democracy. “Attacks on freedom of the press are attacks against international law, humanity, and freedom itself — everything the UN stands for,” he said.

Alarmed at the increasing targeting of journalists around the world, and the failure to thoroughly investigate and prosecute such crimes, he called on all societies to spare no effort in bringing to justice the perpetrators of such attacks.

He paid tribute to all who work in difficult and dangerous conditions to provide the world with free, unbiased information.

The head of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco), Koichiro Matsuura, stressed that press freedom and access to information served the wider development objective of empowering people by giving people the information that could help them gain control over their own lives.

“Access to information is primordial to the exercise of the basic human right of freedom of expression,” Mr Matsuura added. To be free, the media need to have access to information. Such access is also indispensable in fighting corruption, which has been defined as the primary obstacle to development.

The winner of this year’s Unesco World Press Freedom Prize is a Mexican reporter, Lydia Cacho Ribeiro, who has been a target of death threats, sabotage and police harassment because of her work uncovering prostitution and child pornography networks.

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DNA database solves 1 in 800 crimes

Monday, May 5th, 2008

A massive expansion in the Government’s DNA database has brought fewer than a thousand criminals to justice, it was revealed last night. For every 800 DNA samples being added by the police - including those taken from innocent people - only one crime is being solved.The revelation undermines Labour’s case for the expansion of the controversial database, which contains the details of more than a million innocent people.

Ministers claim storing samples taken from those who are never convicted or charged has proved a crucial weapon in the fight against crime.

But figures to be published in the annual DNA database report, due later

this month, will show a huge increase in the size of the database has had very little impact on the number of offences being solved.

In 2006/7 661,433 samples were added - which amounts to 75 genetic records being created every hour.

But the number of crimes detected

using the DNA entries increased by only 839 from 2005/6, to 41,148. It is the equivalent of only one extra crime being solved for every 788 new samples entered on the database.

Opponents said it was proof that holding on to the DNA records of people who had done nothing wrong was not the answer. Questions were also raised about whether the database is providing value for money. Storing more than 660,000 extra samples last year cost around £3million - or £3,575 for each extra crime detected.

The cash could have provided training, equipment and salaries for 60 extra police officers.

Phil Booth, of the NO2ID civil liberties campaign, said: “This utterly blows away the myth that the DNA database is the perfect detection tool. It is, in fact, creating-a nation of suspects.”

Shadow Home Secretary David Davis said: “This demonstrates that the Government’s arbitrary and haphazard approach to the DNA database has done little to make the public safer.

“The Government should answer our call to take a more focused approach - putting the database on statutory footing, and targeting those who have committed crime.

“It is absurd that, on the one hand, there are over a million innocent people on the DNA database, yet on the other hand the government does not hold the records of every serious offender in our jails or terrorist suspects subject to control orders.”

The database, which has been expanding since 2000 and is the biggest in the world, contains 4.5million samples. There are 150,000 children aged 16 or under on the system, with another 334,000 aged between 16 and 18.

In the past, police could take DNA samples only from suspects who were charged with a criminal offence and these were destroyed if they were subsequently cleared or a prosecution dropped.

But under reforms introduced in 2000 officers no longer have to erase innocent people’s entries.

A further change in 2004 gave police the power to take DNA swabs from anyone arrested for a recordable crime, which includes minor public order offences.

Ministers are awaiting a European Court of Human Rights ruling on the inclusion of innocent people’s details against their will.

Two British men argue their human rights have been infringed by the decision to keep their details on the database.

Michael Marper and an unnamed teenager, both from Sheffield, had their DNA and fingerprints taken after they were arrested in 2001 but neither was convicted. If they win the appeal, up to 560,000 samples could be destroyed.

A Home Office spokesman said: “The DNA database has revolutionised the way the police can protect the public through identifying offenders and securing more convictions.

“It is a key intelligence tool, providing the police with on average around 3,500 matches each month. The number of matches more than doubled between 1998/99 and 2006/07.”

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3.5 Million Tons of Plastic Floating in the Pacific

Monday, May 5th, 2008

David Gutierrez | A mass of plastic debris twice the size of Texas is still growing in the Pacific Ocean, fueled primarily by plastic trash generated on the land. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch consists of 3.5 million tons of trash, 80 percent of it plastic, floating in a rarely-traveled portion of the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and San Francisco.

“With the winds blowing in and the currents in the gyre going circular, it’s the perfect environment for trapping,” said Marcus Eriksen, director of research and education at the Algalita Marine Research Foundation in Long Beach, Calif. “There’s nothing we can do about it now, except do no more harm.”

According to Chris Parry, public education program manager for the California Coastal Commission in San Francisco, the garbage patch has been growing tenfold every decade since the 1950s. This corresponds with an equivalent increase in worldwide ocean debris.

The debris is highly dangerous to ocean life. Birds and marine animals may injure themselves by swallowing hard, indigestible shards of plastic. Animals like sea turtles, which mistake plastic bags for jellyfish, may also eat plastic that is less immediately harmful but just as fatal in the long term.

“These animals die because the plastic eventually fills their stomachs,” said Warner Chabot, vice president of the Ocean Conservancy. “It doesn’t pass, and they literally starve to death.”

Plastic, which is synthesized from petroleum, can persist for decades before beginning to degrade, making it nearly impossible to get rid of once it is produced.

Parry and Chabot agree that the best way to keep the Great Pacific Garbage Patch from growing is to reduce production of plastic waste and use fewer plastic products at the consumer level as well.

“What we can do is ban plastic fast food packaging,” Chabot said, “or require the substitution of biodegradable materials, increase recycling programs and improve enforcement of litter laws.”

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Al Jazeera Cameraman Freed From Guantánamo

Monday, May 5th, 2008

RHC | Al Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Haj has been released from the U.S.-run military prison at Guantánamo. Arrested in Pakistan in December 2001, al-Haj had spent nearly six-and-a-half years at Guantánamo without charge or trial. He had been on a more than a year-long hunger strike to protest his imprisonment.

Earlier today, al-Haj landed in his hometown of Khartoum, Sudan, where he was immediately rushed to a hospital. After a tearful reunion with his family, al-Haj said he worried for the prisoners he left behind at Guantánamo. He told reporters that he was happy to be released, but concerned about the situation of his brothers who remain in Guantánamo. Al-Haj said that the conditions at the U.S. prison are “very, very bad, and they get worse by the day” — adding that the prisoners’ human dignity is constantly being violated.

Sami al-Haj was flown into Sudan on a U.S. military aircraft along with two other Guantánamo prisoners. They told Al Jazeera they were blindfolded, handcuffed and chained to their seats during the flight home. According to Al Jazeera Director General Wadah Khanfar, the U.S. military tried to coerce al-Haj into spying on his employers at the network.

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Obama and Wright: Different Worldviews

Monday, May 5th, 2008

By Ted Glick | “We did not have to go through any of the violent upheavals that Europe was forced to endure as it shed its feudal past. Our passage from an agricultural to an industrial society was eased by the sheer size of the continent, vast tracts of land and abundant resources that allowed new immigrants to continually remake themselves.” Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope, p. 55

Jeremiah Wright summarized the difference between him and Obama in his interviews last weekend as, “I do what pastors do. He does what politicians do. I am not running for office.”

But there is more to it than this.

Rev. Wright is an unapologetic African American preacher who has no hesitation speaking the truth in the best of the religious prophetic tradition. He uses the word “imperialism.” He talks about “oppressors” and “oppressed” and “God’s desire for a radical change.” He says, accurately, that “you cannot do terrorism on other people and expect it never to come back on you.”

Barack Obama, as is clear from a close reading of “The Audacity of Hope” and a review of his Democratic Party political career, is all about rising up within the world of the Democratic and Republican parties, the corporate duopoly. And if you are committed to that political world and becoming President through it, it is not surprising that you would do things like whitewash U.S. history, as the quote above does. Genocidal policies toward Indigenous people, the hideous reality of slavery and Jim Crow, the invasion of Mexico and takeover of much of its territory, even the Civil War and Reconstruction: nowhere in Obama’s book does he address these truths of our history.

Obama said at his April 29th press conference where he broke with his pastor of 20 years that, “What became clear to me was that he was presenting a world view that contradicts who I am and what I stand for. And what I think particularly angered me was his suggestion that my previous denunciation of his remarks were somehow political posturing. . . so where I start hearing comments about conspiracy theories and AIDS and suggestions that somehow Minister Farrakhan has been a great voice in the 20th century, then that goes directly at who I am and what I believe this country needs.”

It is true that a handful of statements made by Wright in response to questions from the press at the National Press Club gave them an opening to caricature him as too radical, too out of touch with the U.S. political mainstream, the political mainstream that Obama has been laboring mightily, for years, particularly over the past 16 months, to steer in a somewhat more progressive direction.

It is also true that, faced with near-certain, continued media attention on the Obama/Wright relationship, Obama needed to address the “worldview” differences between them, which are real. But was it really necessary for him to use words like these in doing so: “divisive and destructive,” “the spectacle that we saw yesterday,” and “a bunch of rants that aren’t grounded in truth”?

Obama said that “when you start focusing on the plight of the historically oppressed, you lose sight of what we have in common. . . it doesn’t describe properly what I believe, in the power of faith to overcome but also to bring people together.”

If he truly believes that he’s different in this way than Wright, then he didn’t read all of Wright’s National Press Club speech, or he deliberately discounted major parts of it, like this conclusion:

“The prophetic theology of the black church has always seen and still sees all of God’s children as sisters and brothers, equals who need reconciliation, who need to be reconciled as equals. . . Reconciliation means we embrace our individual rich histories, all of them. We retain who we are, as persons of different cultures, while acknowledging that those of other cultures are not superior or inferior to us; they are just different from us. We root out any teaching of superiority, inferiority, hatred or prejudice. And we recognize for the first time in modern history, in the West, that the other who stands before us with a different color of skin, a different texture of hair, different music, different preaching styles and different dance moves; that other is one of God’s children just as we are, no better, no worse, prone to error and in need of forgiveness just as we are. Only then will liberation, transformation and reconciliation become realities and cease being ever elusive ideals.”

Barack Obama has made a genuine effort to run a different kind of campaign, one which is more issue-oriented and less about the divisive and dishonest personal attacks that often characterize what passes for “political debate” in this country. But in this case, the case of Rev. Wright, Obama has failed his own test. The corporate media has made him bend his principles.

If Obama wins the Democratic nomination and if he wins the Presidency, which I continue to hope he does as the best candidate when compared with Clinton and McCain, we can expect to see more examples of Obama rejecting consistently progressive positions. Hopefully, he will feel that it is incumbent that he follows through on much of his generally progressive campaign rhetoric and fights for generally progressive government policies. But like Jeremiah Wright, we need to be prepared, no matter who is elected President, “November 5th, I’m [we’re] coming after you, because you’ll be representing a government whose policies grind under people.”

Government of, by and for the people: that must be the objective. We aren’t going to get it on November 4th, 2008, but if we don’t lose our critical consciousness, if we don’t defend indefensible positions, if we speak truth to power, whether Democrat or Republican, and if we keep working to find the ways to come together into a powerful, grassroots-based, multi-cultural independent progressive movement, we can make progress this year toward that long-term objective.

Ted Glick is active in the climate movement. He is a supporter of Cynthia McKinney’s Power to the People/Green Party Presidential campaign. He can be reached at indpol@igc.org

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America’s Chemically Modified 21st Century Soldiers

Monday, May 5th, 2008

By Clayton Dach | Amphetamines and the military first met somewhere in the fog of WWII, when axis and allied forces alike were issued speed tablets to head off fatigue on the battlefield.

More than 60 years later, the U.S. Air Force still doles out dextro-amphetamine to pilots whose duties do not afford them the luxury of sleep.

Through it all, it seems, the human body and its fleshy weaknesses keep getting in the way of warfare. Just as in the health clinics of the nation, the first waypoint in the military effort to redress these foibles is a pharmaceutical one. The catch is, we’re really not that great at it. In the case of speed, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency itself notes a few unwanted snags like addiction, anxiety, aggression, paranoia and hallucinations. For side-effects like insomnia, the Air Force issues “no-go” pills like temazepam alongside its “go” pills. Psychosis, though, is a wee bit trickier.

Far from getting discouraged, the working consensus appears to be that we just haven’t gotten the drugs right yet. In recent years, the U.S., the UK and France — among others — have reportedly been funding investigations into a new line-up of military performance enhancers. The bulk of these drugs are already familiar to us from the lists of substances banned by international sporting bodies, including the stimulant ephedrine, non-stimulant “wakefulness promoting agents” like modafinil (aka Provigil) and erythropoietin, used to improve endurance by boosting the production of red blood cells.

As the chemical interventions grow bolder and more sophisticated, we should not be surprised that some are beginning to cast their eyes beyond droopy eyelids and sore muscles. Chief among the new horizons is the alluring notion of psychological prophylactics: drugs used to pre-empt the often nasty effects of combat stress on soldiers, particularly that perennial veteran’s bugaboo known as post-traumatic stress disorder syndrome. In the U.S., where roughly two-fifths of troops returning from combat deployments are presenting serious mental health problems, PTSD has gone political in form of the Psychological Kevlar Act, which would direct the Secretary of Defense to implement “preventive and early-intervention measures” to protect troops against “stress-related psychopathologies.”

Proponents of the “Psychological Kevlar” approach to PTSD may have found a silver bullet in the form of propranolol, a 50-year-old beta-blocker used on-label to treat high blood pressure, and off-label as a stress-buster for performers and exam-takers. Ongoing psychiatric research has intriguingly suggested that a dose of propranolol, taken soon after a harrowing event, can suppress the victim’s stress response and effectively block the physiological process that makes certain memories intense and intrusive. That the drug is cheap and well tolerated is icing on the cake.

Propranolol has already been dubbed the “mourning after pill,” largely by those who argue that its military use amounts to medicating away pangs of conscience. For the time being, though, we can set aside our dystopian visions of zombies with guns, since the tranquilizing effects of beta-blockers are unlikely to permit their widespread use on the battlefield. But pharmacology moves more swiftly with each passing year — especially when helped along by defense-research dollars — and we may need to revive those visions sooner than we think.

The Mediated Soldier

In the new model army, brute force and viscera are out. Cutting edge gadgetry, omniscient surveillance and precision long-distance termination is in. What motivates it all is the type of war we fear we’ll be fighting.

On this, the strategists have spoken: with Iraq and Afghanistan as the testing grounds, the conflicts of the future will be guerrilla wars, open-ended, with no battle lines, no rules of engagement and ambivalent or openly hostile civilian populations in which any man, woman or child can turn combatant.

In breeding a future soldier for these future wars, we will inevitably leave behind the mere rectification of human weakness and enter into the realm of the superhuman. Glimpses of this realm have already become commonplace in the form of ceramic-Kevlar body armor and night-vision goggles — wizardry that transforms squishy pink men into bullet-proof creatures of the night.

Such magic will continue apace under the auspices of dozens of military development initiatives across the globe, creating a species known variously as the Future Force Warrior by the U.S., FIST by the British Army, Félin by the French. All are merely the human components of broader visionary projects for what has been called “the army after next,” the most noteworthy of which being the U.S. Army’s Future Combat Systems. With a budget clocking in at $160 billion or so, FCS is not just one of history’s most costly weapons programs; it is an all-encompassing modernization program, one that will usher in a total re-imagining of the armed forces. What FCS and its kin have imagined for soldiers is a battlefield experience increasingly mediated by technology, insulated in a cocoon of “force multipliers” — military parlance for anything that allows you to accomplish more with fewer personnel. In concrete terms, that translates into an array of tools designed to enhance lethality and survivability: next-generation sidearms; headsets that provide live command and control, detailed geographic data and the ability to fire around corners; smart suits equipped with ultralight nanotech armor, micro-climate conditioning, real-time health monitoring and even automated medical care like CPR and drug delivery. Also on the docket are robotic exoskeletons that allow the soldiers wearing them to carry hundreds of pounds — even while running — without breaking a sweat, as well as handheld imaging equipment that grants the ability to see targets through walls.

None of these are sci-fi pipe dreams. The DARPA-developed Radar Scope is already in limited deployment, detecting human breathing through a foot of concrete on two AA batteries. Utah-based robotics company Sarcos is expected to deliver its prototype exoskeletons to the Army this year, at roughly the same time that many of the other Future Force Warrior components begin field testing. Full-scale production of a number of the systems is scheduled for early in the next decade.

The Absent Soldier

It is tempting to say that military technology is steadily transforming war into a video game. Yet there’s a strange irony in the works: as the games claw themselves even closer to the look and feel of real, down-and-dirty warfare, real warfare is fluttering away into strategic and technological abstraction, effectively taking a step back from its own reality.

For all the PlayStation sexiness of the ultra lethal, force-multiplied warrior, the true fate of the in-the-flesh soldier is to vanish into the abstraction.

The explicit purpose of Future Combat Systems is to progressively supplement, to the point of ultimately displacing, the human soldier with a whole array of automated, autonomous and remote technologies — things like unmanned surveillance drones, long-range and non-line-of-sight precision-guided munitions, and unmanned air and ground combat vehicles. Though the latter group may never look anything like Schwarzenegger minus skin, make no mistake that what we are talking about here is weaponized robots.

An oft-quoted U.S. Joint Forces Command study from 2003 (rather candidly titled Unmanned Effects: Taking the Human Out of the Loop) predicted that autonomous, networked robots — faster and more lethal than human combatants — could become the norm by 2025. That may prove overly confident, but a congressional mandate has already called for one-third of all U.S. military land vehicles to be unmanned by 2015, increasing to two-thirds by 2025.

If the idea of autonomous, homicidal robots dashing into troubled Third-World slums sends a major chill down your spine, you’re certainly not alone. Well aware of the nightmarish optics, defense contractors and military brass alike have been presenting a united front, noting that this is about moving soldiers out of harm’s way, not about deleting humans from the “kill chain” entirely.

While there is little doubt that protecting soldiers is the central motivation, shifting troops into a distant pixel-pushing role also performs a secondary purpose: it neatly removes obstacles for those looking to wage war overseas while expending as little of their domestic political capital as possible. You can call it a by-product, or you can call it an ulterior motive, depending upon how dismal your outlook is.

Whatever the reasons, as we lose ourselves in the lovely fantasy of sidestepping the maimed veterans and crying widows, we could be walking right into an even nastier pile of shit. During the bombing campaign that accompanied the 2003 coalition invasion of Iraq, satellite-guided munitions caused scores of accidental civilian deaths. If these people had perished at the barrel of coalition rifles, their deaths would have been called massacres; as it stands, they are mere technical glitches and failures of intelligence.

The moral here is straightforward: once the human presence in the kill chain is diluted, so too is accountability. The future’s soldier could be one surrounded by an inveigling haze of pharmaceuticals, decision-making robots, errant bombs and faulty surveillance data; the only thing to emerge from this haze will be an exhilarating sense of our own guiltlessness. Alas, the populations against which we use our fancy toys are unlikely to share in the feeling.

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We’ve been given a yellow card - Labour

Monday, May 5th, 2008

Patrick Wintour and Nicholas Watt | Gordon Brown is planning to help hard-pressed families in the wake of Labour’s drubbing in the elections with a package including the expansion of shared equity schemes to boost the housing market, the shelving of plans for council rubbish taxes, and putting more pressure on supermarkets to contain food price rises.

But the prime minister has ruled out rushing through a compensation package for the abolition of the 10p tax rate ahead of the Crewe and Nantwich byelection on May 22, fearing that it would turn the vote into a referendum on the issue.

He is also to consider shelving the proposed rise in fuel duty in October, but has no plans to reverse the unpopular increases in vehicle excise duty on some polluting cars announced in the March budget.

The disclosure of the essential elements of Brown’s fightback plan came as he took personal responsibility for the local elections debacleby admitting that his obsession with policy detail may have obscured the communication of big messages.

He also tried to assure voters that he was fully aware of their feelings over rising food and fuel prices. “I do understand this and I feel the hurt they feel,” he told the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show.

He went on to insist that he was not remote from the concerns of ordinary people. “You know I come from a pretty ordinary background … we as a family felt under pressure when the economy was going through difficult times.

“I understand what people are thinking and I understand what people are feeling. And I believe that I’m the right person to lead people through this.”

The deputy leader, Harriet Harman, said the party had to make its language more understandable. She said: “We have to have more of a focus on family finances as well as on the overall economic strategy of keeping the economy stable.”

Some of his closest allies in the cabinet are urging Brown to take greater risks and show greater definition by taking on enemies.

Despite despair at the party’s performance, and Brown’s plunging popularity, there was no sign of a challenge to the leadership from inside the cabinet.

The foreign secretary, David Miliband, said Brown was “the right man to take us forward into the next general election”, but said the electorate were seeking a greater sense of order in society, and greater power. Even the Labour leftwinger John McDonnell issued a statement insisting he was not going to act as a stalking horse candidate.

But Gisela Stuart, MP for Birmingham Edgbaston, said: “While Gordon Brown himself has probably a far clearer vision as to where he wants to take the country than Tony Blair had, I think Tony Blair was better in the telling of the story … Gordon has got the story, but he has lost the knack of telling it.”

Brown is also on probation with parts of his cabinet over the way in which he is communicating his message.

One cabinet member said: “We have been given an almighty yellow card with bright red lights flashing at the edges. It is entirely up to Gordon to decide whether it will turn fully red. He has until the end of the year to do it and he must show within the next three months that he is heading in the right direction.

“That will determine whether these results turn out to be our 1991, the moment John Major recovered, or our 1995, the moment Tony Blair became undefeatable. At the moment everything is up for grabs. It could easily go either way.

“The problem with these young cabinet ministers is that they don’t have teenage children who can tell them they’re sounding or looking prats. They’re at the stage with their children of just telling them to go to bed when they’re awkward. You can’t do that with the electorate”.

Brown insisted he was not going to be shifted only 10 months into the job saying: “I am resolute and determined, and I’ve got convictions and ideas, and I’m not going to be put off by a few days’ headlines from the job that I’m determined to do for this country.

He also touched on the possible reasons for the election debacle. “Perhaps I’ve spent too little time thinking about how we can get our arguments across to the public,” he told the Andrew Marr Show. “And now of course I think people are saying, look can you show us that you can come through these difficult situations. And I believe we will.”

Downing Street hopes the plan to reinvigorate the housing market by expanding shared equity ownership schemes - so far limited to a small number of key workers - will increase the take-up by making buying easier for first-timers. The government has already announced two new Open Market HomeBuy products allowing those who sign up to buy as little as 50%of the property, with a low interest loan on the remainder. However, critics say the government has spent £350m on a scheme that has helped just 700 families.

No 10 also signalled that it would reject an extension of rubbish or bin taxes when five pilots, not due to be completed in 2012, are completed. “Punitive rises in council taxes is not what we need” said one source.

The third element of the plan - action on rising food prices - will comprise backing efforts from the competition commission to pressure supermarkets to restrain price rises at a time of high profits.

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Renditions Ruin the EU Case

Monday, May 5th, 2008

By David Cronin | Collusion between European Union governments and a secret U.S. torture and kidnapping programme has damaged the EU’s efforts to promote human rights throughout the world, an internal paper drawn up by Brussels officials has admitted.

In 2001, the EU approved guidelines on how diplomats representing it should raise concern over the ill-treatment of detainees with the authorities in foreign countries. These guidelines stemmed from a stated commitment to “carry out systematic and sustained action in the fight against torture.”

A new EU assessment of how the guidelines are being applied acknowledges that some governments have accused the Union of double standards because some of its member states have been implicated in the so-called extraordinary rendition scheme operated by the Central Intelligence Agency of the U.S.

The internal paper, seen by IPS, recommends special efforts to “strengthen EU credibility”.

It says that “coherence needs to be assured” between the EU’s stance against torture during its foreign policy work and its own track record on protecting human rights within the Union’s own borders. “Full respect” for human rights should be guaranteed when formulating policies designed to fight terrorism, and expulsion of foreigners should not occur in cases where there is a likelihood they will be tortured, persecuted or murdered once they return to their home countries, the paper adds.

David Miliband, the British foreign secretary, confessed in February that two CIA planes used in the kidnapping and torture programme had landed in Diego Garcia, a British-controlled island in the Indian Ocean, in 2002. This was a reversal of previous denials by the London government that CIA flights had landed on British territory.

Several other EU governments, including Germany, Sweden, Portugal, Ireland and Italy have been accused of allowing their countries be used by the CIA for covert operations. Poland and Romania have both been criticised by the European Commission for their reluctance to provide information about claims that the CIA ran secret detention centres on their soil.

A 2007 report by an inquiry committee in the European Parliament concluded that at least 1,245 CIA flights passed through European airspace or stopped at the continent’s airports between the end of 2001 and the end of 2005.

Claude Moraes, a British Labour politician who sat on the Parliament’s committee, said that the result of the EU’s collusion with the CIA is “a credibility gap when we lecture other countries about torture.

“The allegations are not going away,” he added, referring to reports in late April that the British security service MI5 had “outsourced” torture of United Kingdom citizens to Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI).

Several British nationals arrested in Pakistan have been quoted as saying they were severely beaten by ISI agents before being interrogated by men believed to work for MI5.

Chloe Davies from Reprieve, an organisation that has carried out detailed research into the CIA’s activities, said that Europe’s reputation as a defender of human rights has been tarnished.

“Little by little European powers’ collusion in the kidnap, rendition and torture of terrorist suspects is coming to light,” she said. “We now know that the CIA operated ‘black sites’ in Poland, Romania and apparently even on British territory in Diego Garcia.

“On many occasions CIA aircraft have been allowed to land on or cross European territory, en route to the kidnap and rendition of ghost prisoners to torture in secret prisons in countries like Syria, Jordan and Egypt. In addition European governments have allowed hundreds of prisoners to be ferried through their jurisdiction to illegal imprisonment, torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in Guantanamo Bay (the U.S.-run camp in Cuba).”

The internal EU paper also recognises that there has been criticism of flaws in the EU rules aimed at preventing the export of equipment used for torture or the death penalty.

While these rules were introduced in 2005, a report by Amnesty International published last year found that loopholes in them meant that spiked batons known as ’sting sticks’ used by the Chinese police and ‘hanging ropes’ used for executions in Sri Lanka, India, and Trinidad and Tobago could still be traded.

Since the Amnesty report was issued, the British government has undertaken to ban export of spiked batons and to work with other EU governments to curb the export of torture tools not explicitly covered by the 2005 rules. Amnesty had cited examples of British-made hanging ropes being used to execute prisoners in Trinidad and Tobago and of handcuffs engraved ‘made in England’ used to shackle detainees in Guantanamo Bay to walls and ceilings.

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Hundreds killed by Burma cyclone

Monday, May 5th, 2008

BBC News | A tropical cyclone has killed at least 351 people in Burma and damaged thousands of buildings, according to state television. Parts of the Irrawaddy region were hit particularly badly, with three out of four buildings reportedly blown down in one district.

Burma has declared Irrawaddy and four other regions, including the main city Rangoon, to be disaster areas.

Rangoon has been without power and water, its streets full of debris.

Winds of about 190km/h (120mph) battered the Irrawaddy, Rangoon, Bago, Karen and Mon regions.

The latest death toll of 351 includes at least 109 people who lived on Haing-gyi island, off the south-west coast, officials say.

About 20,000 homes have been destroyed and 90,000 people made homeless on the island alone, a government official said.

The death toll is expected to rise further, as the situation is remote areas becomes clear.

Military and police personnel have been carrying out rescue operations.

In Irrawaddy’s Labutta township, 75% of buildings collapsed and 20% had their roofs ripped off, state TV said.

Cyclone Nargis has since moved towards Thailand where storm warnings have been issued. However, it appears to be lessening in force.

In Rangoon, internet and phone connections have been down since the storm drew near, making it difficult to confirm the extent of the damage.

Official media report that four people were killed and four vessels sank in the former Burmese capital’s harbour.

One Rangoon resident described the damage in the city for the BBC Burmese service: “Everything was wrecked. Roofs of the houses and satellite dishes were blown away.”

A Rangoon-based diplomat quoted by Reuters news agency described the city as an “utter war zone”.

Anthony Craig, a regional official of the UN World Food Programme based in Thailand, said that judging from the damage caused to solid buildings in Rangoon, damage elsewhere was likely to be extensive.

“We’re seeing a lot of trees down, a lot of billboards blown away, roofs of houses gone, so that is worrying when you consider the type of construction that is there, compared to the type of construction that is elsewhere,” Mr Craig told the BBC.

A trishaw driver in Rangoon, who did not want to be identified, complained that the security forces were not doing enough to help.

“Where are all those uniformed people who are always ready to beat civilians?” he asked.

“They should come out in full force and help clean up the areas and restore electricity.”

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Bush backs modified crops

Monday, May 5th, 2008

By Andrew Ward and Daniel Dombey | George W. Bush on Thursday stepped up pressure on the European Union and other governments to lift restrictions on genetically modified crops to help ease the crisis in global food supplies.

The US president said modified crops offered a partial solution to the food crisis gripping some parts of the world because of their high yields and resistance to drought and disease.

“These crops are safe,” he said, “and they hold the promise of producing more food for more people.”

The remarks came as Mr Bush proposed a fresh $770m (€498m, £390m) in food aid, in addition to the $200m in emergency aid announced two weeks ago.

If approved by Congress, the funds would increase total US food aid this year to $2.3bn, up from $2.1bn last year.

“We’re sending a clear message to the world: that America will lead the fight against hunger for years to come,” said Mr Bush.

Global food prices have increased by 43 per cent over the past year because of soaring demand from developing countries and droughts in Australia and other crop growing countries, according to the White House.

Decreased supply and rising prices have led to food shortages from Haiti to the Philippines.

The White House rejected criticism that its support for the development of ethanol for fuel had contributed to the crisis by increasing pressure on corn supplies.

Officials said that the use of corn to produce ethanol accounted for just 2-3 per cent of the increase in food prices, and a third of the increase in corn prices.

However, the White House acknowledged the need to develop alternative sources of ethanol to reduce pressure on corn supplies – pointing to the $1bn committed for research into the use of grasses, wood chippings and agricultural waste to produce energy.

Dan Price, the US national security adviser for international economic affairs, said that most of the aid would go to Africa, with some of the funds earmarked for technical assistance to help countries grow more food.

He said GM crops would allow poor countries to produce larger, more resilient harvests but said restrictions in Europe and elsewhere provided a deterrent to investment in GM crops.

The US last year provided more than $2.1bn of food aid to 78 developing countries, with more than $1.8bn dispersed by Food for Peace, the agency that is the main provider of US food aid to the rest of the world.

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English village to be invaded in spybot competition

Monday, May 5th, 2008

By Ceri Perkins | A village in south-west England will shortly be swarming with robots competing to show off their surveillance skills. The event is the UK Ministry of Defence’s (MoD) answer to the US DARPA Grand Challenge that set robotic cars against one another to encourage advances in autonomous vehicles.

The MoD Grand Challenge is instead designed to boost development of teams of small robots able to scout out hidden dangers in hostile urban areas.

Over 10 days in August, 11 teams of robots will compete to locate and identify four different threats hidden around a mock East German village used for urban warfare training, at Copehill Down, Wiltshire (see image, top right).

The robots must find snipers, armed vehicles, armed foot soldiers, and improvised explosive devices hidden around the village, and relay a real-time picture of what is happening back to a command post.

Urban hazards

The robots will need to negotiate the complexity of an urban environment to find the threats. Hazards include unfamiliar terrain and buildings, trees, near-invisible overhead wires and other urban clutter.

Teams will earn points based on how many threats they locate in one hour, and how autonomous they are. For example, a team will lose points if they use remote control to direct their vehicles at any stage of the trial.

The teams that score highest will be rewarded with the potential of a lucrative contract with the MoD, which hopes to see the best ideas rapidly developed to the point they can be deployed by UK forces in places such as Afghanistan and southern Iraq.

“We are in no doubt that this is a difficult challenge,” says Grand Challenge programme leader, Andy Wallace.

Software control

Of the 23 initial entries from teams made up of private companies and universities, 11 were selected to take part in the final, with six thought promising enough to receive MoD funding.

One funded team, the Stellar Consortium, uses two aerial robots and one ground-based one.

A 3m wing-span unmanned air vehicle (UAV) will fly 65 metres above the village and use cameras to gather wide-area surveillance used by software to direct a smaller, 1m UAV flying at 20 metres, and an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV), (see image, middle right).

Those two vehicles use thermal, visual, and radar sensors to make more detailed observations that can be reported back to the base station.

“Physically, the vehicles all have to be launched by someone,” explains Julia Richardson, Director of Stellar Research, “but after that, the mission-planning software hosted at the ground station takes full control.”

Owl swarm

A team called Swarm Systems uses more robots. “We need to gather as much sensory information as possible,” says team leader Stephen Crampton, “so we’re using eight vehicles. And we’re going by air because it gives you more viewing angles.”

Dubbed “Owls”, their battery-powered, Frisbee-sized vehicles weigh under a kilogram and have four small propellers (see image, right). Able to hover and dart like birds, they are GPS-guided and communicate with one another, and the base station, using Wi-Fi. Each Owl carries a trio of 5 megapixel cameras.

“Without giving too much away, the processing power on board each of these vehicles is pretty impressive,” adds Crampton. “They could run full-blown Windows Vista.”

User-friendly tech

A third team, Silicon Valley, has opted to rely less heavily on autonomous vehicles. They have used off-the-shelf technology for the hardware as much as possible, and focused more development onto image recognition and analysis software.

“If you can automate that part, then you have a useful tool,” explains team leader, Norman Gregory. “What we intend to do is deploy various platforms, depending on what the scenario is.”

The team will use a mixture of ground and air-based vehicles, although the team is not yet releasing the exact details. The main ground vehicle is the size of a ride-on lawnmower (see image, bottom right) and can be GPS-guided or remotely directed by a human.

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